Luigi Pirandello
Il Fu Mattia Pascal

First published in serial form in a magazine, "Il fu Mattia Pascal" immediately enjoyed great success with the public in Italy and Europe. Written at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Il Fu Mattia Pascal is influenced by both naturalism and decadence; Pirandello is such an original author that it is impossible to categorize him into a well-defined literary movement. The story is told in the first person and centers on the experiences of the protagonist, who, vainly oriented towards seeking a more truthful and free existence, ends up losing everything, including his own name. Mattia takes advantage of the fact that his relatives and acquaintances believe him to be dead and changes his identity, reinventing himself as Adriano Meis. In the end, Mattia has lost both of his existential possibilities and even the minimal certainties that his old provincial life gave him, but he has understood that true identity does not exist because, behind the mask of the social one, there is absolutely nothing. Cut off from everything, Mattia does not regret his old bureaucratic identity and decides to live hidden and detached from social reality as only an hermit can. Pirandello's work is an allegorical novel about the end of identity and the death of personality. The author emphasizes the fragmentation of individual identity trapped in the meshes of a suffocating society, where everyone is forced to hide behind a mask, whether it be that of work or family unity, unable to express themselves and their ideas freely, but remaining anchored to the role society has assigned them. Every mask, if removed, reveals the void that has been created by wearing it: people then cease to have anything meaningful to say to others aside from empty falsehoods. Life thus becomes a farce in which everyone plays their part, and each individual, linked to others by inauthentic relationships, is ready to point the finger and accuse others if they cross the boundaries of the predetermined play. Under society's influence, we end up perceiving ourselves as society perceives us: we see ourselves from the outside, without allowing our authentic self to run free across the endless prairies of the human mind. Each of us is perceived differently depending on who is looking at us: this presupposes that we have various identities depending on how the "other" perceives us. Pirandello's vitalism consists precisely in this: life is seen as a continuous transition from one state to another, making man full of different facets: people change over time. At one moment we are a person with certain characteristics, the next moment we are already another person, we have changed. Pirandello inherits this theory from the French psychologist Alfred Binet, who believed that multiple people existed within each man, which, unknown to the individual himself, expressed themselves through him. For Pirandello, the individual is crushed by the society in which he lives, from which he cannot escape precisely because of the social nature of the human being, and finds himself dreaming of better opportunities and a different life. Mattia indeed tries to redeem himself by pursuing a more authentic life, estranged from society, where masks fall and one can truly look at oneself for who one really is, not for the social status imposed by work and family. The author depicts the crisis of Positivism, the faith in science that made the world seem ordered through indisputable universal principles. The Positivist viewpoint was single, the rational one of science, which left no room for the expression of the emotional sphere but suffocated the multiplicity of forms into a single essence. Therefore, Pirandello attacks the vision of an orderly world, fully comprehensible only through scientific tools and leans towards a vision of reality with a thousand forms, complex, constantly changing, where every "personal" point of view is a truth of itself undeniable, since it is true for that individual. Thus, for Pirandello, reality breaks into different fragments that do not make sense in their entirety but have only in themselves. The laws governing the mechanism of life are in constant change, making it impossible to grasp a truth, given the short duration of its authenticity. Men seek absolute truths upon which to regulate their existence, wanting to establish the ground beneath their feet even though, as Pirandello keeps reminding us, it can only collapse. Everyone is the author of an incommunicable truth and thus in constant conflict with that of others: hence, words can only communicate falsities, circumstantial empty phrases that do not show the true inner self. In Pirandello one can therefore find the theory of relativism: every truth is no more than a subjective and never universal projection; every principle is personal, and this creates incommunicability between men, too different from each other to truly appreciate themselves. This communicative incapacity makes the individual alien to others, lost inside a world of his own. The individual is chaos, changes according to the situations in which he finds himself and according to the moods he experiences, which send him each time in a thousand different directions that, like a labyrinth, ultimately lead to a freedom of thought that positivists can only envy. For Pirandello, the only form of art capable of capturing all aspects of reality and showing the dark side of the moon of every concept, invention, or idea is the humorous type, choral art that represents reality by showing its multifaceted aspect and continuous contradictions, refuting any certainty. Mattia Pascal, despite his transformations and various identity changes, remains the same: this is the reason for his defeat, which is the defeat of each of us since, even hating it, we would feel lost without our social identity which, in a world dominated by the bourgeoisie, has now supplanted individual identity and is a point of reference first and foremost for ourselves, as we see ourselves now as others see us. However, sacrificing oneself in the name of the community is a big mistake, because in doing so the peculiarities of each individual, different from others and as such, are a heritage for all humanity, are lost. What would the world be without individual differences? We would find ourselves in a boring and flat daily life where nothing can surprise us anymore: this is precisely what's happening today, where more and more individuals see the world through the eyes of their TV and become "globalized," losing their cultural identity. The peculiarities of the individual disappear in the name of what pleases the majority, the different shades evaporate, leaving us with only a single model to follow. At the same time, the television concept that either you're a star or you're nobody, as if your individuality doesn't matter and you are part of a shapeless mass of anonymous individuals, prevails for everyone. The transformation of the world into a single panorama presupposes the metamorphosis of every individual into a single model is one of the most current and disturbing themes of our present day. An enduring theme even today, the crumbling of personality is a symptom of the era between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where industrialization forced millions of workers into alienating factory work and relegated them to the bizarre yet gigantic modern metropolises, in which every man appeared like an ant in front of a pyramid. Even the bureaucratization of society caused a strong depersonalization that made man a single, anonymous atom in the vastness of a gigantic organism. The idea of a self as the author of its destiny, promulgated by the bourgeoisie during the nineteenth century, shatters and gives way to a self separated from the society in which it lives and wanders aimlessly like a mad particle. The lack of identity makes men lonely and fragile, like pieces of a mosaic that make no sense on their own but only in the social context. Pirandello points the finger at the cruelty of bourgeois society, which, like a prison, swallows all identities only to regurgitate dehumanized individuals, already dead inside and yet still alive, apathetic towards life. For this reason, Pirandello can be described as anarchic, as he rebels against all institutions and the social forms on which they are based, aiming for a more authentic life where everyone expresses themselves for who they are. The author also attacks the bourgeois family life, monotonous, dull, where resentments stagnate and rot, eroding those relationships that should instead strengthen each person's identity. Work, for Pirandello, is the field where scoundrels get rich on the backs of honest people, oppressed by long hours and the repetitiveness of their role, almost entirely replaced by machines. Individuals thus end up becoming cogs in a great machine, in which instead of a name, a number takes over. Pirandello's critique of bourgeois society is total, without being able to escape into ideals of possible alternative societies: there is no escape from this disheartening type of existence. The only practicable path to liberation is through art and imagination, or the even more radical choice of madness, which for Pirandello is the revolutionary tool par excellence, which demolishes any pre-planned vision of the world in favor of the plurality of viewpoints. Pirandello often proposes in his works the character of the exile, who alienates himself from society and sees other men, enslaved by collective mechanisms, with a mixture of hilarity and pity. This Pirandellian attitude is called "philosophy from afar" because those who adopt it, like a hermit, are totally estranged from social reality and, as if they were on the top of a mountain, contemplate men as small insects bustling in their daily efforts, for reasons that seem futile and absurd to him. Therefore, for Pirandello, to live an authentic existence, one must remain in solitude.